Geno Smith to get a high-wire opportunity 😨

The guardrails are off for Geno Smith this season.

Whether that’s for better or for worse remains to be seen. 

For two years, Pete Carroll did a fairly masterful job of bolstering his quarterback’s confidence, even calming him in one memorable moment in the middle of a game.

There was always going to a limit to how much Smith was allowed to do. This didn’t have anything to do with Smith’s personality or his ability even. It was more about Carroll’s reluctance to put everything into the hands of his quarterback.

I believe things will be different this season. Very different. 

I’m not going to say the training wheels are off because that would minimize what Smith has done the past two seasons. What I will say is that the ceiling is going to be significantly higher for him playing in Ryan Grubb’s offense. This will also leave more room to make mistakes, and it will not just be Smith’s ability to avoid those mistakes, but how he reacts when they occur that’s going to be the focus of the main part of today’s newsletter.

But first, a few links for your reading pleasure:

Quick reads 

• If you read one thing today, make it this.

  I’ve never met Luke Arkins in real life. He is, however, a Mariners fan who I’ve gotten to know through his insights and thoughts on baseball in general and the Mariners in particular. I subscribe to his newsletter, Mariners Consigliere.

  Luke lost his wife, Carrie, earlier this month, and he wrote a tribute to her that I found beautifully moving and a testament to the power that I do believe sports has to deepen our relationships with the people around us whether they are friends or partners. My deepest condolences to Luke and everyone whose life Carrie touched. May she rest in peace.

• A grudge that grew from ‘The Blind Side’

  Grudgery is the free weekly newsletter I write on resentment and anger, and this week’s edition looks at how Michael Oher -- the subject of a best-selling book and award-winning movie -- came to harbor some very hard feelings about the family that took him in. Also, turns out the author of the book is kind of a jerk in the way he’s talked about Oher. 

• The thin-skinned GM might be the real problem

  No one who’s read my newsletter will be surprised to learn that I think Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto should be let go. In a column for The News Tribune I spelled out the reason why I think he’s become toxic for the franchise.

• Hear me, hear me

  Mitch Levy summoned me from the bullpen to fill in for Scott Soden on Episode 301 of “Mitch Unfiltered.” This was kind of surprising, chiefly because I hadn’t been what you’d call all that accurate in my last two appearances, and from the beginning Mitch thought this might be a bad idea. (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t totally terrible).

Upon further review 

In Monday’s newsletter for premium subscribers, I pointed out that the trade of Darrell Taylor removed the last of Seattle’s 2020 draft picks from the roster. The Seahawks picked eight players and nary a one made it to the point where they signed a second contract with the team, and no, I don’t count Taylor because he wasn’t a true free agent this offseason and the Seahawks clearly weren’t all that interested in keeping him if they dealt him to Chicago for a sixth-round pick in next year’s draft. 

Turns out that might not be as big of a failure as I implied.

There is a Web site called 33^rd team, which draws on the experience of a number of former NFL coaches, players and executives. What I’ve found most interesting is some of the more statistical studies they’ve done.

Two years ago, they looked at how likely a player was to re-sign with the team that drafted him. The sample is the 2010 through 2017 drafts, and they delineated the results based on rounds. The results surprised me:

• Only 31 percent of all first-round picks wound up re-signing with the team that drafted them. 

• In every round, a player was more likely to sign with another team than they were to re-sign with the team that drafted them.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising as it was to me. After all, there are 31 other teams in the league, and you’re essentially asking what are the chances that one of those 31 other teams likes or values this player more than the one team that drafted him.

However, the results were striking, and the fact that three of Seattle’s 2020 draft picks were signed as unrestricted free agents this offseason speaks to the fact that draft class wasn’t nearly as big of a bust as I seemed to think it was.

The Group Chat

To say that Geno Smith will have the biggest impact on this Seahawks season is somehow both obvious and understated.

It’s obvious because the quarterback ALWAYS has the biggest impact on his team’s season. It’s the nature of the position in high-level tackle football.

It’s understated because it fails to convey just how pivotal this year will be for Smith.

If he takes another step from where he’s been, and Seattle wins 10 or 11 games, he’s going to not just remain the Seahawks starter but will be in line for a significant contract extension after the season. He’s turning 34 in October, and he’ll be at the helm of an offense that has notably catapulted two players from being college afterthoughts into draftable prospects:

1. When Michael Penix came to Washington in 2022, he was an oft-injured player whose signature performance against Penn State was almost two years in the rearview mirror. After playing for two years in the offense Grubb called, Penix was the No. 8 overall selection in the draft.

2. When Jake Haener came to Fresno State in 2019, he’d just watched Jacob Eason, a heralded transfer, be named the starter ahead of him at Washington. Dylan Morris and Jacob Sirmon were also on the depth chart. Haener sat out that first year as a transfer, played in 2020 and 2021 with Grubb as the offensive coordinator under head coach Kalen DeBoer. Haener blossomed as a junior, leading Fresno State’s upset of then-No. 14 UCLA. Haener remained at Fresno State after Grubb followed DeBoer to Washington. Haener wound up being chosen in the fourth round, the same round that Eason was selected. That’s something that was hard to imagine back when they were competing for the Washingtons starting job in 2019.

Now that’s college, this is the NFL. But I think that Grubb’s offense is built to maximize a quarterback’s impact on the game, and that belief sat in the back of my mind as I watched Smith play for the firs time in the preseason.

Look, I know it was just the preseason.

And I know the Browns weren’t playing their starting defense.

But still, did you see how Geno looked on Saturday night?

That 25-yard throw he arced to a diving Jaxon Smith-Njigba on the sidlines.

The 21-yard pass to D.K. Metcalf that looked very much like a point guard feeding his big man in the post for a touchdown.

The ability to evade pressure. 

Sure seems like this is an offense that puts the quarterback in the eye of the storm and trusts him to make things happen, and that is very much NOT the style of offense that Carroll preferred.

This is not a criticism of Carroll, by the way. The way he built the confidence of Smith, and even stabilized him at times, epitomized his strengths as a coach. Not only did Smith perform better than anyone expected, but Carroll worked very hard to keep his quarterback focused. That reality was perfectly illustrated in a brief moment caught by television cameras during a 2022 game:

However, there was always going to be a limit to what Smith was allowed to do under Carroll. That had less to do with Smith’s personality or even his ability and more to do with Carroll’s reluctance to put everything in the hands of his quarterback.

Now Smith has that, and whether he remains the starting quarterback beyond this season, will very much depend on just whether he’s able to capitalize on it, but if he maintains his calm and focus when he makes the mistakes that are inevitably going to occur when you’re trying to make the kinds of plays that are possible in this offense.

The unsolicited recommendation

There are approximately 80,000 people in the world who are native Irish speakers. About 6,000 of them live in the north of Ireland. Three of them are rappers. “Kneecap” is the (at least a slightly) fictionalized story about the origins of this very real Irish-language hip-hop trio from West Belfast. 

• It makes a compelling and ultimately subversive case for the importance of indigenous languages in general and Irish specifically.

• The scene in which one of the MC’s debates the nomenclature of his country with a young lass – mid-coitus – was wildly hilarious.

• The fact I’ve spent the past two mornings singing, “I’m an H-Double-O-D, low-life scum that’s what they say about me” speaks to the way their sound has wormed its way into my ears.

There’s a ton of cursing even more drug use and a politically charged romance. As someone who’s been a) a rap fan for 35 years now; b) interested in Irish history; c) white all my life, I absolutely loved it. I’m also going to see them perform in Queens next month.